Universal Analytics: Offline tracking opportunities in 2013?

There has been some chatter about upgrades to Google Analytics planned for 2013. There are a few opportunities that may present themselves and a few issues that could arise from the possible changes.

People ask us all the time, how can I track the value of a lead generated online when they are buying in the store. This was something that we solved using Yahoo web analytics. When the lead was generated it received a customer id number, the information of that customer is stored with their permission and if a sale occurred the revenue was attributed to the marketing channel or channels in a multi-channel attribution model. The ability to upload revenue tracked from a CRM like salesforce allowed our clients to make informed budgetary and strategic decisions. This is the case with many brick and mortar stores, businesses that require quotes, or any business that you cannot assign a given value to each lead.

Googles new regarding Universal analytics can be seen here. The basic news reveals Googles plan to allow the ability to track across multiple devices as long as the user is signed in from that device, the ability to sync online and offline data, and an increased ability to track Mobile Application analytics. It will allow users to create custom dimensions as well, such as store visits and so on.

The opportunities to pair mobile app metrics, location information, crm data and attribute revenue to each impression or visit will open up another niche of mobile and brick and mortar marketing and could mean big changes in analytics for showroomer’s and lead generation marketing alike. The insight into quality of lead generated will allow users to make excellent decisions on budgets, impression frequency, channels used and collect ROI data that is unavailable without being hindered by technology costs.

Recently after opening the AdCenter Editor and attempting to download an account we would be confronted with annoying message “Microsoft.adCenter.Desktop has stopped working”.

We tried uninstalling and reinstalling about 20 times as well as every other solution we could find. Nothing solved the problem.

Here’s what worked for us…

Renaming the old user.config file. C:\users\<username>\AppData\Local\Mirosoft\MAF\LocalStore – Find the user.config file and name it something like user1.config